Wednesday, June 07, 2017

Frank Bruni doesn't call the students at Evergreen State College "Social Justice Warriors" but that is what they are. And you can tell they are because the tactic used by the students is to:

1. Call all who disagree with them on an issue touching race "racist"
2. Shut down the discussion

The only thing that's lacking is the third step, which is claiming that anybody who complains the discussion was shut down is suffering from "white fragility."

Step 1. Call those who disagree racists:

Bruni:

I asked Bridges about the epithets hung on Weinstein. He said that such terms are being deployed too readily and casually.“Using the word ‘racist’ halts the conversation,” he said. “It just ends it. It doesn’t explore the beliefs, the values, the behaviors that comprise individuals.”Isn’t he, too, being characterized as racist?“Of course,” he said. “It’s just the way discourse goes these days.”

Step 2. Shut down the discussion.

Bruni:

Confronted with a loud barrage of questions, he asks the students, “Would you like to hear the answer or not?”“No!” several shout. And there you have it. They’re not conducting an interrogation. They’re staging an inquisition.

This is where I'd like to bring up white fragility. Dr. Robin DiAngelo, who created the phase, states "White people in North America live in a social environment that protects and insulates them from race-based stress. This insulated environment of racial protection builds white expectations for racial comfort while at the same time lowering the ability to tolerate racial stress, leading to what I refer to as white fragility. White fragility is a state in which even a minimum amount of racial stress becomes intolerable, triggering a range of defensive moves."

As always, DiAngelo is lying about white people.

There are few whites (if you can identify exactly who counts as "white") who are unaware of racial injustices in the United States. Many white people, probably a majority, are aware that there are penalties involved with being non-white in the US.

But as always, Social Justice Warriors don't do nuance. They believe in simple explanations for simple minds.

True story:

One summer when I was eight years old my two younger brothers and I were at a kind of day camp at the local public school. We attended the Catholic school during the school year, but the Catholic school didn't have a summer day camp.

My brothers and I had no knowledge of the racial strife going on at that time in the world at large. My parents were not political people and so we certainly wouldn't have heard anything through them. We lived in an all-white suburb of Philadelphia. A choice of location which, I feel compelled to point out, neither my brothers nor I had any say in.

One day me and my brothers were sitting in the grass outside the school. I don't remember there being any adults around, I'm not sure why. I assume there should have been some adult oversight of a bunch of little kids. In any case, in the distance was a crowd of black kids, around my age, maybe some a little older. My brothers and I had no feelings about the black kids, one way or another. And suddenly the black kids started chanting something like: "oh, ah, get off of our land." And began walking towards us. In my eight-year-old wisdom I said to my younger brothers: "we don't have to move - we aren't on their land. This is the school's land." So we remained seated, our own little sit-in you might say - although of course we had no knowledge of the sit-ins that happened during the struggle for civil rights in the South.

And so the black kids marched over us, kicking us as they went. We told our parents about it afterwards and we weren't sent back to the public school day camp after that.

I still feel guilty I let my younger brothers get kicked around because I was so naive. I had no idea at the time why those kids would decide to target us. It's clear to me now that they targeted us because we were white.

As an adult I understand that the black kids had a better idea of the ongoing civil rights struggle and that's why they targeted us for our ethnicity, while we didn't understand the background for why they targeted us. Because yes, black people have suffered horrifically in this country and were struggling to make the world more fair through the Civil Rights movement. And the black kids were clued into the struggle. But the victims of oppression are not necessarily saints. And the response to oppression often results in targeting innocents. My brothers and I, although white, were innocent of perpetrating wrongs against black people. But we were trampled on anyway.

It's not the worst thing that could ever happen, obviously, but it's not nothing.

My anti-racist bona fides

Although I was smeared on Tumblr by infamous bully Mikki Kendall and identitarian extremist K. Tempest Bradford (and thanks to the cozy relationship between Tumblr and Google, the smears show up in my search results), in fact I have a long history of opposing racism, and the evidence for the past 10 years is on this blog. Unhinged extremists like Kendall and Bradford don't care to know anything about the strangers they randomly smear. That's why they and the people who promote them like Verso books are horrible and don't help solve the problem of racism in the United States.